Spam: I wrote a website for a friend who does English/German translation. This is my attempt to push it up the google rankings and maybe even get her some business: http://baumgarten-translations.com/.

We were going to the Head of the Trent tomorrow (well, today now, cos I delayed this post) but the forecast is looking awful: Div 2 and the novices are already cancelled (for some mad reason we were entered as IM2). Since that means I don’t have to get up at 5 am tomorrow its not all bad news :-). This afternoon I wandered down the river to watch the Lents, or at least the first two divisions with the most amusingly dubious rowing.

In between races it is quiet and peaceful.

Continuing: as it turned out, the Trent *wasn’t* cancelled but we did wimp out of our sunday morning outing and do a few ergs instead. Our thin excuse was that we couldn’t see the edge of the river: wading out with waders rather than boots it was possible to poke a pole in to mark it, but no-one was keen. Perhaps a slight lack of determination there.

Sorry, this seems to have morphed into a diary entry. Ah well.

On the way back home: if you know this bit, it is the little triangle of land behind the UL near the ?real tennis? courts on the footpath towards Coton; normally a humble little stream but today a roaring torrent, or not quite, because the rain abated. Appalling picture quality due to my phone’s camera; still it was nice to have. And due to the power of – aha – Bluetooth, I xferred the photos to M’s laptop, with only a certain degree of cursing (eventually realising that the laptop wasn’t going to offer a removable-disk type option and I’d have to xfer each from the phone view’s “send”).

Late addendum: you must watch the EDSAC film. As well as being ‘istorical it is wonderful fun. Committees! People with mustaches! Punched tape! What more can you want.

And another:

Thisis me being narcissistic, of course. Of the two ergs, the second was on a machine with a functioning display :-) and it seems I do better when pushed by a time. Next stop, 30m with a monitor.

I just posed this question to gavin at RC recent thread “climate change commitments” (moderated out?) and was wondering if you have any reponse in due time:

1. I don’t understand their figure. The IPCC AR4 scenario A1B(21) calls for warming between approx. 2-5 deg C by 2100. This is a “middle of the road” scenario which would look outrageous on their figure. It also is beginning to look outrageous to systemic eyes.
I want an answer to this, please: In order for the AR4 scenario I mention to come true, the decadal increase in temp observed from 2000-2010 would need to jump 100% to 700% per decade to reach the modeled change. Is this outrageous to a physicist at this point????????

[Oh, I think the answer is that you shouldn’t be using a 10 year average -W]

Sorry, it looks like I didn’t realize their figure was the “constant” CO2 model ensembles in the RC post.

OK – how about 20 years? I don’t think this is just rehashing the old weather vs. climate stuff. It hits at statisctics, probability, systems, etc. You must admit that, for each step nowhere, or slightly back, catch-up will need to be more dramatic (and even more dramatic as time passes in stasis)? Doomsday type drama? Is that what we’re in for?

[Well, to hit +2 oC over the century you need 0.2 oC per decade, which seems entirely plausible given the past. Hitting +5 would be tricky -W]

ah, but then you are only looking at a 10 year (or “short” 1980-200)average trend of your choosing, albeit one which has the (or one of the) forcing(s) we are agreeing on for the future. The running mean over the last 120 years is less than 0.07 deg C per decade, and the last decade is beneath that I believe. All of this is elementary and I’m sure somewhere has been dealt with, so I will conclude here. But in my mind, it leaves a “naked” precautionary principle and not much more.

Well, I’m glad “septic” wasn’t a typo. Whatever the spelling (N.B. the k in your last), the word is meaningless without knowing what a so called skeptic is skeptical of. As an omphaloskeptic, it’s easy to see there is, in climate, no singular skeptic position. There are as many reasons for skepticism as there are skeptics.

[In the GW wars, “skeptic” is a label for a side. It doesn’t mean actually-skeptical-in-the-traditional sense. Wiki used to have an article but it got deleted :-( -W]

Help your friends website… It will only take about 4 minutes. First, make it proper html. Second, give it a title (sorry, I don’t know the correct way to format to get the less than and greater than to show up). Finally, put the “GERMAN-ENGLISH and ENGLISH-GERMAN TRANSLATIONS” inside an h1 tag. Search engines in general think that things in an h1 tag are meant to be important.

“Major variations in the CO2 abundance
will have only minor greenhouse effects
because the strongest bands are nearly
saturated. A change in the present CO2
abundance by a factor of 2 will produce
directly a 2′ variation in surface tem-
perature(18).”

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